Route: The Royal Saxon Way

This route provides an experience of pilgrimage that is unique in England. It starts and finishes with churches still containing relics of their original saints. Princess Eanswythe founded an abbey at Folkestone in the 7th Century and her relics, hidden since the Reformation, were re-discovered in 1885. The abbey at Minster was refounded in the 1930s on the site of an abbey built in the 8th Century to hold the relics of St Mildreth, Eanswythe’s great niece. A fragment of these relics was taken to the Netherlands during the 11th Century and thus survived to be returned to the abbey in 1953.

The route passes through Lyminge where Eanswythe’s aunt Queen Ethelburga founded an abbey in the 630s. The relics of St Eadburg, abbess at Minster after Mildreth were translated to Lyminge in the early 9th Century. The whole route thus joins together churches that are specifically linked with the Anglo-Saxon Kentish royal family as well as many other ancient churches in a historic landscape that is largely Anglo-Saxon in origin.

This route touches on many periods of history including at Lyminge a site with evidence of occupation by some of the first people returning to the British Isles after the last Ice Age.